Gum­road

Myr­iad artists and un­lim­ited pos­si­bil­i­ties await for all…

Okay, this one isn’t ac­tu­ally an on­line art school, but over the past cou­ple of years Gum­road has be­come the de facto place to go for art tu­to­ri­als and thus de­serves a men­tion in this ar­ti­cle. It was started as a space for cre­ative types to share and sell their work, but more re­cently has been heav­ily adopted by pro­fes­sional con­cept artists, il­lus­tra­tors and 3D modellers as a space to sell their own tu­to­ri­als.

Gum­road doesn’t of­fer up a syl­labus or com­pre­hen­sive se­ries of lessons in the man­ner of the other art schools dis­cussed here, nor does it of­fer any­thing in the way of class­room sup­port or feed­back out­side of email. In­stead, it func­tions as a path­way di­rectly into the minds of your favourite artists.

There is an enor­mous range of top­ics avail­able through Gum­road, with an equally vast range of pre­sen­ta­tion styles. A typ­i­cal Gum­road video might of­fer an hour or more of video footage with voiceover de­scrib­ing the process, bun­dled with the ac­tual source files so that the stu­dent can open them up and tin­ker around, de­con­struct­ing the artist’s process. Prices and qual­ity can vary wildly, but are typ­i­cally around $3-$20 (£2-£14). Think of Gum­road as a nice way to sup­ple­ment a more com­plete course.

Espen Olsen Sæter­vik is one of hun­dreds of artists mak­ing the most of this pop­u­lar ser­vice.